Book Thongs by Julie
By skeet | August 6, 2008
I have a collection of book thongs. Several of the members of the Table of Contents are pretty crafty and have generously gifted their fellow book-lovers with them. I use them to mark my place in every book I read. They don’t slip out and get lost like paper bookmarks, and they won’t mar or crease your book like the big paper-clippy looking things. You’ve probably looked at the book thongs on the twirly racks while standing in line at your favorite bookstore and concluded, as I have, that the prices are ridiculously high. I know you’ve been lusting for some, though, so here’s a tip: Check out the Handcrafted Book Thongs over at my friend Julie’s place. They’re made with 100% hemp thread, come in a variety of designs and sizes and are priced just right. Julie will even custom design one for you, so get over there and tell her what you want. Julie’s Book Thongs are just $6.99 each and shipping is free via USPS. What a bargain!
Technorati Tags: book markers, book strings, book thongs
Topics: Shopping | No Comments »
What are you paying for gas?
By skeet | August 5, 2008
When I first bought my Saturn I couldn’t fit $30.00 worth of gas in the tank. My last fill-up, a week or so ago, cost me $57.25. I’m almost down to fumes again and am working across-island tomorrow, so I’ll have to fill up before I leave the Waianae Coast in the morning. GasBuddy.com says I’ll be paying about 10¢ a gallon more this time. Their quoted prices have not always been spot-on for me, but prices around the island can vary greatly, so that’s to be expected. I know I’d pay much more if I bought it in town instead of out here in the country.
Do you shop around for the lowest gas prices? How far would you drive to fill up for a few pennies less? Too much driving will burn up any savings, of course, but if prices vary near home it makes sense to do a little comparison shopping before you pour that liquid gold into your tank. If you live in the US or Canada, GasBuddy is a good way to check before you roll out of the driveway. Most areas have prices listed station-by-station so you can select the best prices in your own locale. Good luck with that!
The graphic is from GasBuddy.com, showing current average gas prices in Honolulu.
Technorati Tags: gas price comparisons, gas prices, GasBuddy.com, Hawaii gas prices
Topics: Travel and transportation, Shopping | No Comments »
Get your free coffee right here!
By skeet | September 28, 2007
Never let it be said that Skeet keeps a good thing to herself! I don’t know about you, but I can’t start my day without coffee. The only thing better than waking up with a great cup of coffee is waking up with a great free cup of coffee. I ordered my free sample of Folgers Gourmet Selection coffee and now you can, too. I’m getting Creme Brulee. What’s your pleasure?
Technorati Tags: coffee, Folgers Coffee, free samples
Topics: Freebies | No Comments »
Target coming to Hawaii
By skeet | April 8, 2007
I love the Target television commercials. The ads are so arty, with brilliant use of color and style. I’m pretty sure that if there were a Target store near here, the commercials would make me want to shop there. It seems like pretty effective marketing to me. I’ll have the opportunity to test the theory sometime in the future. Target has announced that they are coming to Oahu. Two stores will be opened some time in 2009. One of them will be centrally located in the Salt Lake area. That will be conventient to most of the island, since major freeways and highways connect nearby. I’m more excited about the Kapolei location. Look at the map in the article. See where Farrington Highway joins the freeway right there next to Target? Farrington Highway is the only access to my part of Oahu, the Waianae Coast. I shop at Kapolei on a regular basis. It’s convenient for me to get off of the freeway there whenever I’m returning from a trip off of the coast. It’s about fifteen miles from my home, but since I have to pass it coming and going, it’s easy to do my shopping whenever I’m out and about for work or other errands.
What excites me the most about this, though, is that there is a KMart right there in Kapolei and a WalMart about five or six miles away. My experience has been that those two retailers are very competitive in pricing. Brand name items are almost always identically priced. Similar items of different brands are usually within a few pennies, price-wise. It seems logical that adding a Target Store to the mix can only be a good thing for local shoppers. Tsrget have to align their own pricing with the other two retailers. If they price signifigantly lower than WalMart and K-Mart, those stores will have to lower their prices in order to compete. I certainly hope my logic holds up. If so, the buying public will be the true winners in the retail wars.
Technorati Tags: competitivie pricing, discount stores, KMart, Target, WalMart
Topics: Shopping | No Comments »
Free downloads
By skeet | April 3, 2007
There are a couple of freebie sites on the web that I find myself going to again and again. Two, in particualr, I should go to every day, but I sometimes forget. That’s why I’ve decided to add a ticker for Giveway of the Day to my sidebar as soon as I know that my WP is functioning properly. It never fails that if I forget to check them, that’s the day they will have had something I really wanted. Actually, I want almost everything that they give away, but they give away so much free software that I’m afraid I’d crash my computer if I took it all, so I try to exercise restraint and only download stuff I’m sure I’ll use. Giveaway fo the Day is just what its name implies. Each day they give away premium software. I’ve downloaded photo-editing, file management and audio software from them. A few days ago I missed something I really could have used: Clone Terminator - a program “designed to clean your computer from duplicate files. ” I’m always a little afraid to eliminate files that I think are dupes because I’m afraid I’ll disable something I need, so this would have been an ideal solution for me.
Giveaway of the Day has a sister site called Game Giveaway of the Day. Same deal: first rate software given away free. Today’s free game is Animal Empire. Looks like something I would want if I had kids in the house, but I don’t, so I’ll pass. That’s okay, because there will be games that I do want on other days. These are licensed, full verions, not the little teasing snippets you get from some sites to entice you into ordering full versions for big bucks. I like computer games, but they’re not something I want to spend a lot of money on, so I really love this site.
The free daily offerings on both sites change at midnight. Both sites have active user communities that jump in, download the software and begin evaluating and posting their findings. I find it useful to wait until a download has been available for a few hours, read the evaluations and then decide whether or not to accept a given offer. Bugs happen. Why waste time on a package that wasn’t quite ready for release? You have a full twenty-four hours to decide, so there’s no need to rush.
Once I get my ticker installed I’ll see it every day quit missing good stuff. Once you start visiting me every day, you’ll start making them a habit too. Win/win!
Technorati Tags: software, computer games, free downloads, free software, Giveaway of the Day, Game Giveaway of the Day
Topics: Tech stuff, Freebies | No Comments »
Aggrevation
By skeet | April 2, 2007
I’ve had Skeet Shops up for over a week now. My WordPress edit functions are still all screwball. I’m enough of a novice to WP that I’ve really thought that I was doing something wrong, and I’ve tried to the point of tears and pulling out hair to get things straightened out. If I’m going to run a few blogs with WP, I really need to learn how to do things for myself, so I’ve been stumbling around in my admin panel trying to see what in here looks different from the way things are at my other blog. I have managed to learn a few things, so the time has not been entirely wasted. I only moved Stuff to WP a month and a half ago, so there are things I’m finding out that I hadn’t needed to know over there yet. But today I’ve come to the conclusion that something is wrong with either the template or the version of WP that I downloaded here at Shops. I can only write posts in the “visual” mode, which means that my links are totally screwed up. I can’t upload pictures at all. When I try I get little empty boxes with red Xs in the corner. Today I’ve got a big panicky knot in my throat and my head is aching hellaciously. It’s time to call in reinforcements. I’m going to hate feeling like a complete idiot when I find out that it’s some little, simple thing that “everyone knows,” but I’ll just have to face that. I want to introduce Skeet Shops to the world and start building up some readers and blogroll links, but it’s too much of a mess right now to do that. Tonight I’ll see if I can get my most helpful friend on IM and see if she can help me.
Right now I think I’ll wash down some Tylenol and take a nap.
Technorati Tags: WordPress, WordPress bugs, technical glitches, blogs, novice bloggers
Topics: Tech stuff, Just stuff | No Comments »
Jeans!
By skeet | March 30, 2007
I paid my phone and cable bills today. I work all over the island. When I have work lined up in Mililani I always try to remember to check the due dates on those bills because both service companies have store-fronts there with bill-paying counters. Sure enough they were both due, so I went to the cable office on the way to my inspection and to the phone company after. I really should just stick a stamp on the phone bill and drop it in the mail. See, one of my favorite stores shares a parking lot with the phone company and that can mean trouble - the kind that hacks into my budget. If you’ve ever shopped at Ross you probably understand. Lots of designer clothes at drastically reduced prices, luggage, shoes, handbags and all kinds of gift items and things for the home that I never see anywhere else. Now I know I’ve told you that I’m not fond of shopping, but that’s not completely true. If I can do it at my leisure, in the middle of a weekday when the stores aren’t crowded, I can find it an enjoyable experience. I’m just now shopping for Christmas and birthday presents that I missed when I was broke, so I had a valid reason to do some browsing. I found a couple of teapots and a CD, so I was off to a good start, but came up dry after that.
I haven’t worn jeans in about fifteen or twenty years, but I’d been thinking about buying a pair. Ross was a good place to start, or so I thought. I had certain criteria in mind, inspired by watching too much of Stacy and Clinton on What Not to Wear. Stacy-and-Clinton-approved jeans will be straight-legged, dark wash, mid-rise. They are best worn with elongated, pointy-toed shoes (ACK!) and the overall look is supposed to make me look taller and slimmer. See, I really believe that this stuff is going to somehow transform my current short (5′3″) and average-in-a-downhill-skid-towards-dumpy figure. I’ve seen it work for women of various ages, sizes and body types, even some that were shaped somewhat like me. So I’ve bought the hype and today was my first atttempt to buy the jeans. I’d made some healf-hearted efforts last fall when the Stay and Clinton hype started to convert me, but today I decided to face the problem with seriousness and tenacity.
I won’t keep you in suspense. I didn’t find them. While Ross does carry a wide varitety of styles and sizes, they did not have jeans for me today. It seemed like everything they had in mid-rise, straight-legged, dark-wash jeans was made for either an Amazon or a tiny doll of a girl. I carried ten or twelve pair into the fitting room and not one was even close to being Stacy-and-Clinton-approved once adorning my body. I’m going to try to keep believing, though, because Stacy and Clinton say it’s going to happen. Stay tuned for further developments!
Technorati Tags: jeans, Ross Clothing Store, TLC, What Not to Wear, Stacy and Clinton, shopping for jeans
Topics: Dicounts, Shopping | No Comments »
Walmart online
By skeet | March 26, 2007
Yeah, I know! That’s a pretty lowball place to start sharing my shopping experiences, isn’t it? Hey, everyone knows about Walmart. Big stores, low prices. But how familiar are you with Walmart online? I do a lot of comparison shopping there, especially if I’m buying a big-ticket item. I don’t always end up spending my money at Walmart, but I usually start there so I can have an idea of what kind of price range I can expect when I shop around. I can do some basic comparison shopping without ever leaving their site. Say I’ve decided to buy a new TV. Actually, the one in my office has needed replacing for quite some time. It was given to me by a friend who was moving off-island about five years ago and was well-used then, but it’s time to retire it. It’s got a tiny 13-inch screen, which was fine for a freebie, but I’d like something a little larger. So I go to Walmart’s elctronics page and click on the tab for TVs. A table sorts the televisons by screen size and features. I know that I want a smallish screen and a built-in DVD player so I click on TV/DVD/VCR and I’m down to three choices. Now I’m ready to surf around and look for better prices. I know that two different brands of 15-inch TVs with DVD player sell for between $225 and $240. That’s my target range and I’ll look for TVs that meet my criteria and fall in or below that range.
I’ve used this same method for furniture, office machines, electronics and even my last barbecue grill. The grill I eventually ended up buying in the local Walmart store when it went on sale for a better price than I had found anywhere online. My camera came from Costco online. Sometimes I end up at Office Max or Circuit City, either online or brick and mortar stores, but Walmart is my starting place. Try my method next time you’re shopping for a big ticket item and see how it works for you!
Technorati Tags: Walmart, comparison shopping, online shopping, TVs
Topics: Dicounts, Sales, Shopping | No Comments »
I’m diversifying!
By skeet | March 24, 2007
I’ve been blogging at my first place for a while now. I’m finding that there are things I want to blog about that really need their own spot. This is the first. I don’t like shopping in the traditional sense. Yeah, I know, all us women love to shop, right? Well, no. I don’t like going to a mall or a shopping district and slogging around from store to store, looking for a particular item or trying to finish up a shopping list. I don’t like trying on a cart full of clothes or discussing the multitude of available options with an electronics specialist when all I want is a red shirt or a DVD player. Most of the time I just want to go right to the item I’m looking for, take it to a cash register and take it home.
Shopping online has eased my burden greatly. Now I can type in a few words about what I want, key in on options like size, color or features, and find what I’m looking for. I’m getting pretty good at that, but I’ve also discovered that I enjoy taking my time browsing the net. Shopping has become more fun for me now that I can do it without crowded store aisles and pushy sales clerks. I’m becoming more educated about consumer reviews, and eco-friendly products. I’ve learned that some sites are always reliable and some should be checked out pretty thoroughly before sharing my credit card number. And, best of all, I’m finding bargains and exciting new products. I guess I’m pretty much like everyone else in that I love saving money or finding a product that exactly fits my needs.
Skeet Shops is where I’ll share these experiences. I’ll be writing about bargains and coupon sites. This is where I’ll share my excitement when I finally find the perfect little black dress or just the right watch for my son’s collection. I’ll search out well-balanced product reviews and write my own reviews of my first-hand experiences. I’ll be asking for your advice when I want something and know that my expertise is lacking, like I did at Skeet’s Stuff a while back when I wanted to buy a new camera. Mostly, I hope this will be a place where we can all share some of the joys of shopping while removing some of the headaches.
Welcome to Skeet Shops! I hope you’ll like it here!
Technorati Tags: shopping, introduction
Topics: Shopping, Just stuff | No Comments »
